I like it… as soon as politically feasible (ie ‘demographically’ feasible?), start taxing accumulated wealth. The 50-year-old offspring of an 80-year-old dying baby boomer doesn’t need a huge inheritance, as someone argued above. And when that wealth is allowed to pass to the next generation it ossifies the existing social order and makes it much harder for the children and grandchildren of poor baby-boomer parents, and for recent migrants from developing countries, to improve their income level. Inheritances allow inequality to be preserved across generations, in other words. And, as the post argued, the asset wealth of the baby boomers was not gained by fair means; it was gained by the sacrifices of the parents of the baby-boomers (the ‘war generation’, do we call them?), and gained by running down the publicly owned assets of the country and off-loading costs to future generations – ‘intergenerational theft’, in other words.

Pension cuts or means-testing in 10-30 years time will hurt the unlucky elderly who didn’t enjoy their generation’s wealth; reduced public spending on health, education, infrastructure and welfare will only hurt the younger generations; and monstrous inheritances will help a sizeable portion of the population become very wealthy but will leave the remainder out in the cold, in a high-tax low-service situation. So it seems to me a good strategy would be wealth taxation.

You are correct – I got that wrong. Fixed in the post, thanks for pointing it out.

The pledge says that if he were Minister of Education he would resign as Minister, and if not he would publicly condemn the breach of promise – not that he would resign from parliament.

I have paid off two student loans and the sky hasn’t fallen in. I can’t see a good reason why I shouldn’t have paid a small fraction of the cost of an education that I will be the prime beneficiary of in the future.

Of course in other cultures the older generation more commonly funds or backs the younger ones than is customary in ours.

Debt is a new form of slavery and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal , there is no human relation between master and slave

. . . or something like that.

I long ago accepted that I probably won’t be able to afford a house, and that I’ll probably work until I’m dead without having paid it off.

C’est la vie. What ya gonna do?